The World's Most Dangerous Power Struggle

Think North Korea’s Kim Jong Il is a threat? You should see who’s vying to succeed him. Joshua Kurlantzick on the Dear Leader’s deadly legacy

1. THE DEAR LEADER IN DECLINE

On April 22 of last year, in the North Korean town of Ryongchon, not far from the Chinese border, a train car filled with ammonium nitrate exploded and devastated an area roughly five miles in diameter. Thousands of homes were destroyed, many of them vaporized and replaced by an enormous crater, and an estimated 170 people, nearly half of them children, were killed in the blast. North Korea&#x2019;s impoverished clinics couldn&#x2019;t handle the lines of wounded who arrived with horrific burns on their bodies and faces, stone and glass embedded in their skin. One foreign-aid worker who was allowed on the site a few days after the explosion described the child survivors he saw as being &#x201C;completely burned, their faces almost ripped off.&#x201C;

The government in Pyongyang described the explosion as an accident caused by faulty electric cables that ignited the train&#x2019;s cargo, and the state-run Korean Central News Agency praised the citizens of Ryongchon for rushing into burning buildings, dying in their attempts to rescue portraits of Kim Jong Il, their Dear Leader. &#x201C;Many people of the county evacuated portraits before searching for their family members or saving their household goods,&#x201C; the KCNA reported. &#x201C;They were buried under the collapsing buildings to die a heroic death when they were trying to come out with the portraits. The Korean people&#x2019;s spirit of guarding the leader with their very lives was fully displayed.&#x201C;

That&#x2019;s one way of looking at it. Another is that someone was trying to kill Kim Jong Il, who happened to be on a train that passed through the Ryongchon station just hours before the blast. The South Korean press reported that Kim had planned to be near Ryongchon at the time of the explosion but that his schedule was changed at the last minute.

As with so much in the North, it&#x2019;s impossible to know the truth. &#x201C;I&#x2019;ve heard it both ways on the train explosion&#x201C;—that it was either an accident or an assassination attempt—one U.S. official who closely follows North Korea told me. If it was an attempt on Kim&#x2019;s life, it probably wasn&#x2019;t the first. In 1995 there was allegedly an attempted coup by a faction of Kim&#x2019;s army, and there have been rumors of other attempts over the past decade.

More recently, though, a number of signals coming out of North Korea, beyond the recent agreement to halt its nuclear-weapons program, suggest the most isolated nation in the world may be on the verge of a meltdown. Unprecedented social unrest; an ongoing famine; power struggles and purges among Pyongyang&#x2019;s elite; hints that the Dear Leader is losing his grip on his subjects and is preparing to pass control on to one or the other of his feckless sons… Times appear to be tough in the Hermit Kingdom, and the question hanging over all of these rumors—what happens post- Kim? —is perhaps the most important security question in the world.

To try to get a handle on that question, I spent the past several months talking to academic and political experts on North Korea (there are surprisingly few of them) and sitting in bars and cafés and safe houses in Washington, Tokyo, and Seoul, among other places, speaking with North Korean defectors. Few of the exiles would talk to me without the promise of confidentiality, and even then, many appeared terrified that their words would cause harm to them or to family members still in the North. (In one small restaurant in suburban Virginia, I sat in a private room with a former North Korean munitions specialist who refused to speak whenever our waitress appeared and who would intermittently walk around the restaurant, apparently looking for spies.) Despite the exiles&#x2019; reticence, eventually one defector would introduce me to another, who in turn would introduce me to someone else who would have specific information. Because the North is so hard to penetrate (&#x201C;We know so little; access to the inner circle is so limited,&#x201C; says the U.S. official quoted above), what follows is by no means a complete picture, but instead a glimpse, constructed from interviews and reports that should be regarded as informed analysis rather than established fact, into the very scary (and sometimes very strange) world of the Dear Leader and his sons.

2. INTERLUDE WITH THE CHEF

A curious thing happens when you find your way to the few people outside the Hermit Kingdom who have known Kim Jong Il intimately. To be sure, there&#x2019;s talk of political infighting, of intimidation and purges of political cadres, but there&#x2019;s also a lot of talk of weird parties. And while it&#x2019;s hard to say that these descriptions add much to the world&#x2019;s trough of North Korean intelligence, they&#x2019;re definitely worth passing on.

In a bland Tokyo conference room, I meet a man who goes by the name Kenji Fujimoto and who served for years as Kim Jong Il&#x2019;s personal chef and confidant. Though Tokyo is dominated by salarymen in matching dark suits and white shirts, Fujimoto is dressed like he&#x2019;s just come from a South Dakota biker rally, with a leather jacket, huge Harley-Davidson belt buckle, and pinkie rings. His greasy black hair is cut into a mullet, and he smokes nonstop, using my business card to brush ashes onto the floor.

Oddly, given the way he stands out, he turns away and hides his face whenever anyone steps into the room. &#x201C;Whenever we have a party, it goes into the next morning,&#x201C; Fujimoto tells me. &#x201C;The longest I attended was four days. Sometimes we can go to bed, but only if Kim Jong Il falls asleep; then the party is finished.&#x201C; In addition to endless drinking (former CIA profiler Jerrold Post noted that Kim Jong Il was the world&#x2019;s largest importer of Paradis Cognac), Fujimoto says the Dear Leader &#x201C;keeps a special team of dancers. They are beautiful, these dancers—28 is the retirement age. When they turn 28, Kim Jong Il wants them to get married to his staff.&#x201C; Fujimoto wants me to understand that the Dear Leader is thoughtful about the needs of his workers. &#x201C;He brings women from Poland as sex workers for me, to take care of me,&#x201C; he says. &#x201C;Kim Jong Il wants to observe how people are thinking. After four days, he can see real people, the real mind of people. At my wedding party, I drank a lot—one and a half bottles of XO Cognac. I&#x2019;m dancing with my wife, and I fall down, and when I wake up, I&#x2019;m in bed.&#x201C; He chuckles and runs his hand through his slick mullet. &#x201C;The next day, Kim Jong Il calls me in. He praises my drinking ability and asks me, &#x91;By the way, do you have any pubic hair?&#x2019; I say, &#x91;Of course I do.&#x2019; &#x201C; Fujimoto pauses here, and my translator looks embarrassed. &#x201C;Kim Jong Il says, &#x91;Why don&#x2019;t you go to the toilet and look at your pubic hair?&#x2019; I went there, and there was none.&#x201C;

3. KIM&#x2019;S TWO SONS

There are two very different sons, Kim Jong Nam and Kim Jong Chol, who are vying to succeed their father as ruler of the world&#x2019;s only Communist dynasty. This assumes that Kim Jong Il will avoid a military coup and, as Jerrold Post suggests, that Kim believes &#x201C;immortality will come through his family, just as [former North Korean leader] Kim Il Sung&#x2019;s legacy was assured by Kim Jong Il.&#x201C;

About thirty years ago, right around the time that Kim Jong Il was quietly appointed his father&#x2019;s successor, the future Dear Leader began to spread his seed. In 1971 a woman named Sung Hae Rim, who was a North Korean movie star, bore him his first son. The boy was named Kim Jong Nam. Like the rest of Kim&#x2019;s children (it&#x2019;s unclear exactly how many, and by how many women, there are), Kim Jong Nam was raised in near total isolation. Merrily Baird, a former CIA analyst who spent over a decade focused on North Korea, told me that the Dear Leader made sure his various mistresses and their children never crossed paths.

Li Nam Ok, a woman who was one of Jong Nam&#x2019;s only childhood friends, defected to Europe years ago and wrote a secret memoir that, perhaps because of pressure on her not to betray Kim Jong Il, has never been published. In the sections of the book I obtained, she describes what has to qualify as one of the world&#x2019;s strangest childhoods.

As a child, Kim Jong Nam was alternately coddled and punished by his father, she wrote. The Dear Leader called home every hour to check on his son, and the boy slept in his father&#x2019;s bed well into his teenage years. She described scenes of Kim Jong Il ordering servants to attend to him and lavishing gifts on the boy—diamond-studded jewelry and mountains of toys. &#x201C;I&#x2019;ve never seen so many toys since,&#x201C; she wrote. &#x201C;I have visited famous toy shops in Austria, Switzerland, and France, but I have never seen their equivalent.&#x201C;

But the boy lived in fear of his father, too, Li said, and even her relationship with Jong Nam was not innocent. Kim insisted that she report back to him on every move the boy made, and &#x201C;I was told never to discuss my visits to Jong Nam or to talk about him to anyone.&#x201C; When Jong Nam disappointed his father, she wrote, Kim would explode, and &#x201C;Jong Nam spent his days gauging his father&#x2019;s moods, terrified of his father&#x2019;s explosive anger.&#x201C; According to her, the boy would at times beg his father not to send people away to labor camps. &#x201C;Jong Nam ran to his father,&#x201C; she recalls, &#x201C;shouting and crying at the same time. Shaking his father&#x2019;s arm, he repeated incessantly, &#x91;No, no, no. Don&#x2019;t send them to the mines, Papa.&#x2019; &#x201C;

Today, though, Kim Jong Nam is a grown man, a paunchy figure in his midthirties with meaty hands, a doughy face, and wiry black hair in a style that looks a bit like his father&#x2019;s infamous hairdo. He seems to have inherited his father&#x2019;s dictatorial streak, too. &#x201C;He was large,&#x201C; Li wrote of the adult Jong Nam, &#x201C;and his voice carried like his father&#x2019;s. His fury was as impressive as his father&#x2019;s.&#x201C; In his book Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader, North Korea expert Bradley K. Martin describes how Jong Nam became a fixture of Pyongyang&#x2019;s nightlife, drinking and carousing and, when people crossed him, allegedly pulling out his gun and shooting up a hotel lobby or a disco.

Not long ago, I met a recent defector in the coffee shop of a shabby Seoul hotel. Formerly one of the circle of young elites favored by the Dear Leader, he was now so worried for his safety that I was allowed to refer to him only as Our New Friend.

When I ask about Kim Jong Nam, who moved in similar circles, Our New Friend says, &#x201C;I found him kind of stupid. Not very witty. Corrupt, like a con man. He had the traits of a dictator. He treated his escorts, the people who came with him, like they were slaves.&#x201C; Still, he adds, &#x201C;Kim Jong Il clearly seemed to take steps to enshrine Jong Nam as a successor. He let Jong Nam be in charge of some elements of state security. He wanted Jong Nam to learn, through the security agency, who his enemies were.&#x201C;

But four years ago, in the spring of 2001, Jong Nam made a serious mistake. He was detained in Japan for entering the country on a false passport. What he was intending to do there remains unclear. It may have been business, gathering intelligence in a country with thousands of ethnic Koreans. Or maybe pleasure; the Japanese media reported that Jong Nam had previously visited Tokyo&#x2019;s Yoshiwara district, famed for its &#x201C;soaplands,&#x201C; where naked women give men full-body washes. (For his part, Jong Nam told Japanese authorities he just wanted to visit Tokyo Disneyland.) In any case, Japan is Korea&#x2019;s historical enemy, and watching Jong Nam submit to Japanese authorities was reportedly a serious embarrassment to his father. Jong Nam was sent away from North Korea for a while, and South Korea&#x2019;s intelligence service says he now spends his time shuttling between mainland China, Macao, and Russia, trying to find a way to maneuver himself back into the Dear Leader&#x2019;s good graces.

Virtually nothing is known about Kim Jong Chol, a reedy man with delicate, almost feminine features who is now in his midtwenties. Fujimoto, the former chef, tells me that Jong Chol&#x2019;s mother, Koh Yong Hee, a dancer Kim married in 1980, was perhaps the only woman whom Kim Jong Il truly loved. &#x201C;Kim Jong Il and Koh Yong Hee very much seemed to love each other,&#x201C; he says. &#x201C;Whenever we had a party or reception, Koh Yong Hee would talk about when she dated Kim Jong Il before they got married. They bought CDs of love songs, and together they would listen to those songs and talk about when they&#x2019;d met.&#x201C; Needless to say, theirs was not your garden-variety courtship. &#x201C;One of the guards for Kim Jong Il tried to assassinate him from behind, with a pistol,&#x201C; Fujimoto tells me. &#x201C;Koh Yong Hee stopped the guy from shooting Kim Jong Il by force.&#x201C; He smiles and says, &#x201C;Whenever we had a party, Kim Jong Il would tell this story.&#x201C;

Like Jong Nam, Kim Jong Chol grew up separated from much of the world around him. Through a mutual acquaintance, I was introduced to an American man who&#x2019;d attended school with Jong Chol in Switzerland in the mid-1990s and was one of the only non&#x2013;North Koreans to spend considerable time with him. &#x201C;I knew Chol as Chol Pak,&#x201C; the friend tells me one day when I meet with him in Washington, D.C. &#x201C;I had no idea who he really was, and he had another kid with him at all times, who was kind of watching him. I didn&#x2019;t learn much about his life at home; he was very secretive. After school Chol was never allowed to do stuff with me.&#x201C;

Chol wasn&#x2019;t completely isolated, though, the man says: &#x201C;We played a lot of basketball, we played a lot of soccer. And Jean-Claude Van Damme was his idol. He just loved that guy.&#x201C;

We talk a little while longer about his prep-school days and how Chol naively &#x201C;portrayed North Korea as a rich country, like a utopia.&#x201C; At the end of our conversation, he hands me an aged sheet of paper covered in poorly typed sentences. It was one of Chol&#x2019;s old school assignments, an essay entitled &#x201C;My Ideal World.&#x201C; &#x201C;If I had my ideal world,&#x201C; Kim Jong Chol had written, &#x201C;I would not allow weapons and atom bombs anymore. I would destroy all terrorists with the Hollywood star Jean-Claude Van Damme.&#x201C;

4. THE TEA-LEAF READERS

Most of the buildings that make up Tokyo&#x2019;s national-security establishment are clustered in one area downtown, but not all. On a narrow street near the shopping district of Shinjuku, unannounced by any prominent sign, are the offices of a quasi-government organization called Radio Press. Inside, a small army of analysts, crowded by overflowing file cabinets, spends its days monitoring Chinese, Russian, and North Korean broadcasts and publications. Most of what they see or hear out of the Hermit Kingdom is boilerplate propaganda, wild denunciations of the United States or Japan. But the analysts at Radio Press began to notice odd signals coming from Pyongyang. Since October 2003, North Korea&#x2019;s state press has written that &#x201C;the Korean revolution is carried on from generation after generation&#x201C; via &#x201C;succession by blood,&#x201C; and the Pyongyang media reported that Kim Jong Il said he&#x2019;d uphold his father&#x2019;s instructions to pass the revolution on. Around the same time, the North Korean media began creating a personality cult around Chol&#x2019;s mother, Koh Yong Hee, a development similar to one in the early 1970s, when Kim Jong Il&#x2019;s mother was mythologized to help the Dear Leader ascend to power. The state compared Koh to the wife of North Korea&#x2019;s founder and ordered the people to pay respect to her. Kim Jong Il also apparently remobilized the Three Revolutions Team, a group of loyalists he&#x2019;d depended upon years ago to eliminate his enemies. A South Korean succession specialist named Cheong Seong Chang told me that defectors he&#x2019;s interviewed are saying that North Korea&#x2019;s elites are being told to support Chol, that North Korean army officers are now studying Chol&#x2019;s ideas, and that Chol was recently given a position in the department of Organization and Guidance, which is the party&#x2019;s nerve center. &#x201C;Chol took the same spot in the party as Kim Jong Il once had,&#x201C; Cheong said.

And yet, despite the cranking up of the propaganda machine and the mobilization of the Dear Leader&#x2019;s henchmen, the passing of the mantle to Kim Jong Chol is not a sure thing. For one, his mother, the Dear Leader&#x2019;s true love, is now dead. According to Alexandre Mansourov, a former Russian diplomat once stationed in Pyongyang, that makes all the difference.

&#x201C;As long as Koh Yong Hee was alive, her son had a leg up,&#x201C; Mansourov told me, &#x201C;because Kim Jong Nam didn&#x2019;t have a woman whom Kim Jong Il loves whispering into his ear every night, &#x91;My son should be your heir.&#x2019; &#x201C; (Fujimoto suggested this to me, too. &#x201C;Kim Jong Il gets angry at subordinates,&#x201C; he said, &#x201C;but never at the family members of Koh Yong Hee.&#x201C;)

Since Koh Yong Hee passed away last year, Jong Chol&#x2019;s star may have fallen. And Jong Nam, it seems, isn&#x2019;t going down without a fight. &#x201C;Those forces loyal to Kim Jong Nam are launching a counterattack,&#x201C; Mansourov told me; they are trying to portray Jong Chol and his supporters as disloyal and hoping to get them purged.

Mansourov described for me how Jong Nam has supporters in the powerful State Security Agency, the domestic intelligence organization that rivals the military, and several defectors and experts I spoke with agree that Jong Nam&#x2019;s support lies with intelligence, as well as with China, which could be cultivating ties to him.

Though North Korean elites almost never interact with foreign reporters, late last year Jong Nam crossed paths with Japanese journalists at an airport in China. After the reporters gave him their business cards, Jong Nam, like a seasoned political operative, reportedly sent them several e-mails emphasizing that the choice of successor was not finalized. (There&#x2019;s some speculation that these maneuverings enraged the once placid Jong Chol, leading to a plot to assassinate Jong Nam.)

Beyond the struggle between the two sons, however, deeper and more troubling forces are at work. Since Kim Jong Il has not declared one successor, and since Jong Nam and Jong Chol are not nearly as politically savvy as their father, other potential rivals have entered the fray. The most notable is Chang Song Taek, Kim Jong Il&#x2019;s brother-in-law and longtime consigliere. Chang was a feared survivor of internal struggles. &#x201C;Everybody is afraid of Chang,&#x201C; Fujimoto told me. &#x201C;It&#x2019;s like he has supreme power.&#x201C; Our New Friend said that Chang started organizing small groups of his supporters and began to build links to China. &#x201C;He played it up too visibly,&#x201C; the defector said. &#x201C;Kim Jong Il wouldn&#x2019;t stand that.&#x201C;

No, he wouldn&#x2019;t. The Dear Leader reportedly recently purged Chang and many of Chang&#x2019;s close associates. &#x201C;If Kim Jong Il has indeed purged his brother-in-law,&#x201C; said Merrily Baird, the former CIA analyst with whom I spoke, &#x201C;he must indeed be working in a very insecure environment.&#x201C;

A year ago, another powerful player died in a suspicious car accident. &#x201C;When people die in car crashes, you should really wonder,&#x201C; Baird said. &#x201C;There&#x2019;s so little traffic in North Korea, and there is a history of North Korean officials dying in car crashes that&#x2019;s very fishy.&#x201C;

5. DOLLS AND BONDAGE: ANOTHER INTERLUDE

Shortly after Fujimoto told me the tale of his genitals being shaved, I met another remarkable character who had her own special insight into the mind of the Dear Leader. Her name is Hikita Tenko—or Princess Tenko—and she is Japan&#x2019;s most famous illusionist, a sort of female David Copperfield. When I walk into a private suite at an expensive Tokyo hotel, she is seated at a long table wearing a long white gown, raccoonlike eyeliner, massive black eyelashes, heavy white makeup, and jewels on every finger. In a high, breathy voice, Princess Tenko explains to me that Kim Jong Il had seen videos of her illusion shows and decided she must be his.

&#x201C;He saw a cartoon series of me dressed as a Wonder Woman-type figure, and he wanted to bring me to North Korea,&#x201C; the princess says. &#x201C;When the offer came in 1998, Kim said he&#x2019;d used all his networks all over the world to learn as much as possible about me.&#x201C; Kim also owned the entire Princess Tenko doll collection and was holding one when she arrived. &#x201C;He knew basically everything about me,&#x201C; she says. &#x201C;Even my private life—where I lived, what kind of car I drove, where my second house was.&#x201C;

Kim Jong Il brought Princess Tenko to party after party, and she, too, witnessed his intimidating mood swings. &#x201C;He didn&#x2019;t act very normal at the parties,&#x201C; she says. &#x201C;Even the way he talks—it&#x2019;s not like a normal person. He would suddenly become extremely angry, then extremely happy, then extremely angry again. Depending on his mood, the party members would get nervous, very nervous. If Kim Jong Il was angry, he&#x2019;d break things, and they would stand very still.&#x201C; Kim would make special requests, too. &#x201C;In one of my shows, I present myself like a superwoman,&#x201C; she explains. &#x201C;He&#x2019;d request that I wear red bondage-style outfits for the parties.&#x201C;

While Princess Tenko was in the North, Kim Jong Il took her passport and refused to let her leave, ordering his underlings to build her a stage near Pyongyang so, he said, she could perform for him forever. After much pleading, she was released only when she promised that she would come back to the North. &#x201C;When I returned to Japan, I was frightened,&#x201C; she told me. &#x201C;I&#x2019;d never been so frightened in my life. There were several attempts to kidnap me, and I went to [North Korea&#x2019;s unofficial representatives in Japan] and asked them to stop this.&#x201C; She paused here, her eyes wide. &#x201C;They said I should go back to North Korea and discuss this directly with Kim Jong Il,&#x201C; she said. &#x201C;The last &#x91;invitation&#x2019; I got to return to the North was just five days ago.&#x201C;

6. THE ONGOING ENDGAME

In the winter of 2002, a North Korean officer named Ju Sung Il left his post near the demilitarized zone separating North and South Korea. He traced a route to the South that he&#x2019;d studied in order to avoid land mines and other deadly traps and to elude the watchful eyes of North Korean soldiers. Carefully, he picked his way through razor wire and electric fences, eventually firing shots into the air to alert the troops at the South Korean border post that he&#x2019;d made it.

When I meet Ju in Seoul, he looks nothing like the desperate soldier he once was. He wears an open-neck silk shirt, his hair spiked up with gel, and carries a sleek mobile phone and talks of going to America for graduate studies. But Ju hasn&#x2019;t forgotten what it was like to be a soldier in the isolated North and why he left his family behind and took the enormous risk of escaping. &#x201C;The North Korean government stopped paying soldiers,&#x201C; he tells me. &#x201C;Advancement depends only on bribes. If you don&#x2019;t have the money to pay bribes to top military officers, you can be sent to rural areas, where even military officers starve to death.&#x201C; This is the future he saw for himself, and he apparently figured it was better to get gunned down trying to flee across the DMZ than to slowly starve in a corrupt country that had been lying to its oppressed citizens for years. &#x201C;If North Korean people trusted Kim Jong Il,&#x201C; Ju says, &#x201C;there would not be so many of them leaving the country.&#x201C;

Though he didn&#x2019;t know it at the time he escaped, Ju was on the leading edge of a growing wave. In the past few years, tens—maybe hundreds—of thousands of North Koreans have snuck across the more porous border with China. Once there, they see how prosperous the world has become and how bankrupt their country remains, and word of this returns home. Physical goods return home, too: cell phones, books, radios, televisions, all of which continue to destroy the long-peddled government fiction that South Korea is impoverished and the North wealthy.

&#x201C;Social awareness has undergone a revolutionary change,&#x201C; Suh Jae Jean, one of the few South Korean scholars with access to a wide range of defectors, recently wrote. &#x201C;Ideology and loyalty to the party and the leader have lost their value… As soon as North Koreans realized the fact that they were &#x91;masters of their destiny,&#x2019; they have discovered that &#x91;God&#x2019; did not provide them food and livelihood and that &#x91;God,&#x2019; in fact, was nothing but a repressive being.&#x201C;

Suh goes on to describe an even more amazing change: In supposedly controlled North Korea, average citizens are taking their frustrations out on local government and propaganda officials, physically attacking and terrorizing them. Some officials are so afraid of being beaten to death that they&#x2019;re installing elaborate security measures in their homes and refusing to wear their uniforms in public.

But even in the midst of this rising instability, Pyongyang is possibly in possession of enough nuclear material to build at least six weapons, and it maintains the world&#x2019;s fifth-largest army. And history suggests that the Dear Leader takes his biggest risks when holding the weakest cards, to divert attention from internal chaos and to rally public opinion against an external enemy.

A foreign-policy optimist might say, though, that recent news defies this. In late September, Pyongyang agreed that the North would halt its nuclear-weapons program, and the fact that the United States was willing to negotiate with North Korea might suggest that President Bush, who in the past referred to Kim as a &#x201C;pygmy,&#x201C; thinks that the Dear Leader&#x2019;s demise might not be quite so imminent.

Nicholas Eberstadt, a Korea expert at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, has a slightly different take. The day after the agreement was reached, Eberstadt put it this way: &#x201C;To talk of a &#x91;peaceful North Korean nuclear industry&#x2019; is to talk of an imaginary animal, like a unicorn. It&#x2019;s like talking about a &#x91;peaceful chemical-weapons program&#x2019; or a &#x91;peaceful intermediate-range ballistic missile.&#x2019; &#x201C; After all, North Korea and the United States readied another agreement, a decade ago, on a nuclear freeze—an agreement that ultimately amounted to nothing.

Despite all the parsing of signals, it&#x2019;s impossible to truly know how loose the Dear Leader&#x2019;s hold has become. But it&#x2019;s certainly not what it once was, and the looming question of what kind of post&#x2013;Dear Leader leader will emerge is one the world can&#x2019;t wish away. It could be one of the sons. Or it could be that a general more receptive to genuine reform will gather strength and emerge. Or it could be, as many of the defectors and analysts I spoke with predict, a series of military coups and a descent into turmoil, leaving the country and its nuclear arsenal in uncertain hands.

Sitting with Ju Sung Il, the former elite soldier who crept across the DMZ, I ask what he thinks a post-Kim world would look like. &#x201C;I don&#x2019;t know,&#x201C; he says. &#x201C;It&#x2019;s hard to think about.&#x201C; Then, in the extraordinarily understated way that is typical of the North Koreans I spoke with, he adds, &#x201C;It&#x2019;s hard to be optimistic.&#x201C;

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